In my heyday, I could easily organize seizure of an oil platform with just a half hours’ notice and three out of four troop vehicles out of action. I learnt conversational Farsi in two months and put together a recruitment offer for guerillas that I had to scratch out on in charcoal on the back of a bag of basmati rice. I literally had to carry a hostage’s severed foot in a plastic Carrefour packet while I dialed for backup on a broken radio. What I’m saying is I work just fine under pressure. In fact, making shit up on the fly and making it all look good is what earned me my rank in the first place.

So why was I sweating this little ‘date’ with Kay, like it was some kind of volatile negotiation?

Of course I was damn well going to ask her to a restaurant. And then, if everything went well, I was going to try and kiss her again. And of course I had expected it to work. But I wasn’t mad. In fact, I was grateful she demanded more. Wasn’t that what I liked about her?

Clara had been putty in my hands. I never spent a moment on this earth doing a single thing to hurt her, sure. But then, I never had to do much to …win her, either. I gently pushed Clara from my thoughts. I loved her. But it was a love that was finished, and complete. Something precious that I kept safe on the mantelpiece. I didn’t want her memory sharing space with the thoughts I was having about Kay right now anyway…

Our date was in an hour and everything was more or less ready to go. I checked my appearance in the mirror again and shelved another pesky thought I’d been having all day: was I old? Too old? I wasn’t the young buck I used to be, it was true, but I came by my physique honestly. I looked more like a farmer in a Soviet Union propaganda poster than a lean kid on Esquire magazine. And dammit, I still had all my hair, even though most of it was now silvery.

When I arrived at her home all was quiet, and I now looked at those fancy spherical trees a little differently. This was a tower inside which a very peculiar princess lived. I parked, rang the doorbell and watched with interest as a black and white cat eyed me coolly from behind the curtain.

She opened the door. The cat scurried away.

“You…”

She did a little twirl.

“You did say I should be dressed to kill, didn’t you?” she asked sweetly. She looked almost more feline than the cat in the window did.

“Looks like first degree murder to me,” I said stupidly, and again she laughed, half at me, half with me. Something about this gorgeous woman had me fluffing my lines, that was for sure. My eyes went to the deadly black stilettos she was wearing. Jesus.

“You’ll need …more comfortable shoes,” I said. “Those won’t work for what I had in mind for tonight.” I swear to god our eyes quickly caught as we both imagined what black stilettoes like those were more suited to…

She gestured for me to come inside and I watched as she kicked them off and, easy as you please, and began to lace up some grubby looking black Doc Martens instead. She was a badass in a ball gown. She laced up and stood to look at me, expectant.

“You’ll need to bring your camera, too” I said. Again we exchanged glances.

I spent all of the drive over to our secret location anguishing over whether it would be too forward to reach out and put my hand on her thigh. And then I spent the other half of the journey celebrating internally when she reached over and put her hand on mine.

The evening was cool but not cold, and very still. It was the perfect night to visit this place I had discovered once long ago and never had reason to return to until now. As we pulled up in the dark, she went quiet and looked around, trying to discern what the dead-looking buildings could be. I turned off the engine and the car lights blinked off. We sat together for split second in the dark car, the abandoned ruins of the old Montgomery Hotel just a few yards in front of us.

“So, I lied,” I said and turned to her. “It is a restaurant after all… or rather, it used to be one.”

She turned to me with laughter in her eyes.

“Hey! I think I’ve heard of this place!” she said and put her hands to her mouth. I was about to say something but she had already sprung out the car and was striding towards the dark buildings. I stepped out of the car myself and followed her inside. I could already hear her excited squeals from inside.

“This is amazing!” she yelled, and it echoed all through the crumbling brick walls.

Though it was very dark and a little creepy, she ran around like a kid on Christmas morning, without a shred of fear. This place had been a hotel and restaurant back in the day, all done up in art deco style with big dining halls and a kitchen that was so big it more like an aircraft hangar. Dim moonlight found its way in through the broken down windows and gave the place a kind of eerie blue glow. She appeared in a doorway with a huge smile on her face.

“Have you seen this?” she said, breathless. “There are even some old knives and forks in that corner over there. They must be older than I am!”

She reached for my hand and then pulled me along to explore all the other rooms. It was just her and I, alone in this relic of a place, dust and rubble at our feet, the smell of wet brick in the air and the delightful feeling that we were where we weren’t allowed to be…

We explored a wrought iron staircase, then went through old rooms upstairs that even still had a few destroyed chairs in it. We found dusty boxes of moth-eaten tablecloths. I had no idea why the council hadn’t demolished this whole place ages ago. But by the look on her face as she flitted around, I was glad they hadn’t.

Grabbing my hand again, she pulled me over to something that caught her eye: a rusty looking steel door with a circular window.

“It’s locked,” she said, rattling it. She stepped aside as I went to examine it.

Now was my chance.

I had at least impressed her by bringing her on a date that was anything but boring, but to seal the deal I’d need to get this door open, no question. I ran my fingers over the surface. The rubber seals around the edges told me that there was a cold room. I scanned the rest of the kitchen and spied what could have been …a pallet knife? She watched closely as I picked it up and set to work sliding it under the rubber seal and into the locking mechanism. If this was the kind of lock I thought it was, I could unlick an inner lever and get the main bolt to loosen so we could get inside. I broke the faintest sweat as I twiddled the knife there in the darkness, but eventually, the tiniest click sounded out and I looked over at her with a smile on my face. The door still wouldn’t budge though. I grabbed her by the shoulders and gently positioned her out of the way.

“Looks like it’ll need some force,” I said. “It’s probably rusted closed.”

Her eyes went wide as I took a few steps back, drew up all my weight and then came clamoring ahead to drive the heft of my shoulder into the old door. It moaned and creaked but didn’t budge. One more brute shove, however, and it crunched and swung open, revealing the room inside.

She was jumping up and down now and clapping her hands.

“Bravo!” she yelled. I gave a little bow, and then we both cautiously peered inside. My eyes adjusted and soon I could make out row upon dusty row of metal shelves, all empty now. It must have been decades now since anything had been on these shelves. Still, the whole place had an eerie, almost haunted feeling to it. When I saw her go onto her tiptoes to see something hidden off on the top shelves, I got down on one knee and knotted my hands. She put her hands on my shoulders, put the tip of her boot into my hands and took a step up, trying to see as high as she could.

When she bounced down again, she had in her hands a yellowing stack of old menus.

“Oh my god! Look at this… prawn cocktail! There’s a culinary relic for you,” she said and handed me a dusty page. The paper was rough and brittle in my hands.

“This is my favorite thing to do in the world, you know that? Ever since I was a little girl. Old attics, hidden treasure… I love stuff like this,” she said.

“I know.”

I could make out the shining whites of her eyes in that tiny, ancient room as she looked over at me.

“Oh? How could you possibly know that?”

We walked out of the cold room together, brushing shoulders as we went through the narrow doorway.

“Well, I read your book.”

She stopped dead and stared at me.

“You what? But… you can’t even get copies anymore! Jack, seriously, that book was a huge flop, I can’t believe you got a hold of a copy…”

“It wasn’t that difficult, really,” I said, happy that there was at least one way I could impress her.

“Hmmm… I don’t know. There were so few copies printed. God knows I try to pretend that book never happened. I suppose you think you know all my deep dark secrets now?” she laughed.

I shrugged and we kept walking through the ruins. It was a dinner date, of sorts, only it felt like we had pitched up 200 years after the party ended.

“Well, book aside, I figured you’d like this place more from reading your articles, actually.”

“My articles?”

She was now balancing precariously on a narrow board on the ground, arms outstretched to stop her from falling.

“Yeah. I mean, you don’t say anything directly… but I can tell you’re a romantic.”

Here I watched her gracefully pull a cigarette case from her pocket and light a long, thin white cigarette. The smoke disappeared instantly, overwhelmed by the darkness around us. She laughed drily.

“Me, a romantic? You sure about that?” she said and jutted out her hip at me.

“Oh yes, absolutely.”

“Well, that’s a minority opinion. My editor calls me a bulldog.”

I laughed.

“Well, screw your editor. You’re like …I don’t know, a strong liquor. You burn, sure, but you’re the good stuff. It takes a man to enjoy you.”

She looked as though she was gearing up to throw another sarcastic barb at me but stopped herself short. We walked lazily back to the kitchen again, and she traced a long finger in the dust on the once-beautiful marble counters.

“That’s a terribly old fashioned metaphor you’ve got there, detective,” she teased.

I shrugged.

“Yeah, I am kind of old fashioned, it’s true. I mean, look how I’ve brought you to a kitchen for our second date.” Her own laugh joined mine and it echoed softly throughout the crumbling brick.

“Hey, before we go, I need to take a picture,” she said.

We both fell silent for a moment while she crouched and went on tiptoes, trying out different angles to capture the faded glory of a once-grand kitchen. In her one hand she held a faintly glowing cigarette, in the other her camera. She still had on a vaguely Morticia Adams dress and her dusty Doc Martens. At that moment I think she must have been the coolest person I’d ever laid eyes on.

“Look at all this expensive crap, Jack. What’s it all worth now, huh?” she said quietly. The camera flickered and snapped quietly, its own electronic eye briefly lighting up every time she took a shot.

“Not much” I said and looked down at a single buckled pot in the corner. “None of it’s really important.”

In the silence the camera clicked over and over.

“What is?” she said half to herself, then tried another position to capture a single spoon laced over in cobwebs.

“People?” I said.

She stood tall, recapped her camera and then stubbed her cigarette out under her boot.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” she said, as though we weren’t just having some glib conversation, but that she was thoughtfully considering everything I said in great detail.

“Let me photograph you, then?’ she said and took a step towards me.

“Woah, no no no, I don’t do photos, sorry,” I said and held my hands out in front of me. But she gave me a devious smile and uncapped the camera lens again.

“Why not? You’re right you know, even as cool as all this stuff is, you’re still the most interesting thing in here, aren’t you?” she said. The way she was tilting her head and looking at me made me feel like she was already sizing me up, trying to find my ‘good side’. But before I could protest any further she reached out and took my hand.

“This,” she said slowly, then linked her fingers with mine and raised the palm to examine it closely. “This is something phenomenal…”

Her hand was soft and warm and sent little jolts of electricity all through me. I was completely unaccustomed to being …looked at this way. Completely taken aback by how firm and assertive her touch on my hand was, yet still soft somehow. If I didn’t know better I’d almost say she had me under a spell in that moment.

“Kay…” I said, something a little like embarrassment welling up in me. But she was engrossed with turning my hand over and over again in her hand, like it was a precious relic she’d uncovered. When she traced a finger all the way from the crease at my wrist down into the place where all the lines of my palm seemed to meet, my fingers curled up instantly around her touch. She smoothed my fingers flat again and kept tracing her fingers over my skin.

It was almost unbearably erotic. I found myself unable to breathe. Unable to move in case I disturbed the light-as-spider-webs touch she was caressing over the line of each finger. It was as though every part of my body was connected to my palm by electrical filaments, all zinging and crackling with her touch. Though her fingertip barely grazed against me as it moved, it felt like she was doing something far, far more intimate. Some touches are sexy because of where they are. But this touch was sexy because of what it was. Slow. Curious. Hovering occasionally in a pause as though part of the fun was to see my reaction. She touched me like an artist examining an expensive porcelain vase. Like there was something fragile inside that needed coaxing out by the softest of strokes.

“Kay,” I said and tried to clear my throat. But in her other hand she had already gone for the camera, and she immediately pointed the lens down to our linked hands. I watched with my breath caught in my throat as the lens twitched and adjusted, then clicked and flashed.

“There!” she said triumphantly, then took a few more snaps. “Now I have you,” she said and the flash in her eyes was brighter than the camera’s. Indeed. She had me entirely. I was almost literally putty in her hands.

She briefly showed the screen to me and I saw the picture she took. I smiled. Somehow, all the electricity of the moment really was in the picture. Somehow, I could actually see her thrilling, suggestive, beyond-flirty touch, and I could see how my hand, large and rough and dark, was tamed against hers. At her mercy. The flash had given both our hands a ghostly quality, like they were two pale statues floating in nothingness.

“That’s… wow, you’re really good at that,” I said. I looked down at the place where her hand was still touching mine.

“Me? That’s all you,” she cooed, and I swear to god the sound of her voice in that secret, dark place was something I felt right in the pit of my stomach. She placed the camera off to the side on a counter but kept her hand where it was, seemingly well aware of how much she was turning me on right now.

Without thinking, I reached for her and grabbed her wrist, and yanked her towards me hard so our chests pressed in one another. My lips close enough to hers, I could hear her excited breathing. We were alone in this place. Just my lips, just hers, and nothing but that space between us that was growing so full I almost couldn’t stand it.

I lunged forward to kiss her but she smiled and pulled back a little, teasing. She was enjoying it. This was an intelligent woman. She knew precisely what she was doing, and she knew that every second she made me wait, the more I wanted her. When she leaned forward to gently touch her lips to mine, it almost set me on fire. I was already pulling her close to me, greedy, wanting to feel her body against mine if I couldn’t quite see it yet.

She melted her lips into mine and my eyes fell closed to taste her. Fuck, she was the best kisser. Soft, tentative. But the feeling that something raw and completely indecent was right there, waiting in the wings. I could feel it in the tension in her body against mine. I could feel how ready she was, like every limb was poised and coiled tight like a spring.

I kissed her and she kissed me and we kissed each other and it was hard to tell who was leading whom, who was taking, who was being taken… I didn’t know how we ended up shoved against the counter, either, only that it was my hips that were grinding into hers, so it must have been me…

I hadn’t been with a woman since Clara passed. I had put away that part of myself just the same as I had placed my SEAL trident pin in a box in a drawer. All around and inside me was the overwhelming sensation of something unearthed. As our writhing bodies wiped away the dust off the marble counter and revealed something beautiful underneath, I felt like her touch was polishing off an old crust on my heart, and underneath was something… raw. Something unpredictable. I was overwhelmed by the clean, cold air inside this dead place, the warmth of her phenomenal body against mine, the thought that anything could happen here.

Her delicious tongue wrapped slick over mine and she folded back easily as I kissed her, more roughly now, my hands tracing out sexy shapes under her black dress – the narrow swoop of her hips, the swell of her upper thigh, her knee, now spread and opening slightly to me.

To my delight, she put her fingers to her thighs and with a quick movement began to gather up the black skirt, revealing two creamy white thighs, these she parted, and hoisted her hips up onto the counter edge so she could press the warm triangle of a black pair of panties close against me. My heart skipped in my chest. This was all happening very fast. Of course, I wanted to do this. Who wouldn’t? She was a gorgeous woman who clearly wanted me. I looped my hand in her waist and kissed her even more deeply. Her little hands flew around me, tugging at my shirt, at the top of my trousers, then back up to stroke my beard and up the side of my neck. Here it was. The twinkle in her eye, the hint of something dark and wild I was sure I had seen before… well, it was coming out now.

She grabbed my hand, that same hand that had so caught her interest just a moment before, and thrust it between her legs. She was warm and damp and sweet Jesus, the scent of her enthusiastic body had me instantly hard. She pressed my hand against her body and moaned softly into the kiss. Her other hand grasped eager at my crotch and when she discovered how hard I was, she moaned again and writhed, cat-like, against my hand.

This was actually happening. I was here in this bizarre place with a beautiful woman I’d only met a few days ago and her hand was on my cock and her little tongue was moving more quickly over mine as we kissed on the counter. She thrust her hand through my open zip and found her way to the bare skin. I gasped and pulled away from the kiss. She smiled at me and held my gaze there, and we both froze except for her teasing stroke and my twitch in her hands.

And then the fucking worst thing happened.

Look, honestly, when you get to my age, sex starts to feel like a lottery. When you’re young, a dick is a wonderful thing to wield, a miraculous tool that’s like those old Tom and Jerry cartoons: no matter how much abuse it takes, no matter what happens, it’s always ready to go again. You never imagine a time when your lust could possibly run out. You wake up with morning wood that could cut diamonds and take it for granted. For half my life I was hiding erections, nursing blue balls and wacking off whenever I could just to keep on top of how horny I was. Now, I was entering into the next part of my life, where my cock decided to sabotage me in a completely new way.

I went soft in her hands. Fuck. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and carried on stroking her. I squirmed away a little. Shit. Not now.

“Kay, uh…” I began but she kissed me to shut me up, completely unconcerned that I was clearly about to make an ass of myself. Her words were immediately in my ear. She was a sophisticated woman who was used to an exciting, impressive life and here I was, an old washed up nobody with a limp cock…

I pushed her away a little.

“I’m sorry,” I said. She kept smiling.

“Sorry for interrupting me when I was in the middle of kissing you?” she said and leant in again. But I couldn’t kiss back. I turned my head aside then grabbed her hands, half to start apologizing and half to discourage them from groping me. She looked to the floor. Thankfully, she didn’t’ seem mad. But I could almost feel the energy of the moment evaporating. I quickly reached down to zip away the sad deflated party balloon my cock had suddenly become.

I looked at her and felt like shit.

“It’s… it’s been a long time for me,” I said lamely.

She pecked my cheek. Then, instead of lingering around to tell me how it wasn’t my fault, how it happens to all men occasionally (like Clara might have), she wriggled from my grasp and went to explore the room a bit more. Just like that.

It’ll sound stupid but the ease with which she walked away and shimmied her skirt back down over her thighs again …it made me seriously regret pushing her away.

“You know what this place reminds me of?” she said in a cheery voice. “It reminds me of this time I was doing a story in Venezuela, about women who marry American men there hoping for a better life and all that? I don’t know why. Nothing here looks like the houses there, but somehow it feels the same. Know what I mean? Like the air is the same,” she said.

My head was spinning. I was still reeling from my recent embarrassment, which was supposed to derail everything and set off the complete and utter meltdown of the universe as we knew it …and she was talking about Venezuela.

I followed after her. It was as though our brief little fumble against the counter hadn’t even happened.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do think I know what you mean. It’s got that… I don’t know, secret building smell. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Reminds me of when I was in Syria a few years back. The desert could get so hot, but some of those old buildings are icy cold.”

She began to walk out of the building, back to the car.

“So, why aren’t you a journalist anymore?” I asked.

“Well, I got married” she laughed. “I don’t know why, but at the time I seriously thought those two things were incompatible. Turns out I’m kind of ‘traditional’, too,” she said and laughed. I couldn’t find any evidence that my malfunctioning dick had disappointed her deeply, but I was hesitant to breathe a sigh of relief just yet.

“Why aren’t you a SEAL anymore?” she asked me when we reached the acre. Nobody had ever put it quite so bluntly before.

“Why? Well, that’s a complicated question…”

“No it’s not,” she giggled. I opened the car for us and we climbed inside. But I didn’t want to drive off just yet.

“Well… I suppose the official answer is that me and my team had a mission go bad on us, and it was in everyone’s best interest that we all step down afterwards. Frankly, a lot of us wanted to step down…”

“Well, what’s the unofficial answer?” she asked. As a journalist, she must have known that I couldn’t talk about my missions.

I sighed.

“The last mission was… not what it seemed like at first. We were stationed there on what we all thought was good intel, but turned out to be… well, let’s just say that we were all duped.”

“I now what it’s like to think you’re the good guy and suddenly realize you’re actually the bad guy,” she said.

“I… I’ve never thought about it like that but…”

“I know you can’t tell me details but… did you resolve everything?”

I laughed out loud.

“Resolve? These aren’t the kind of things that get resolved. People with enough power always get what they want, in the end. That’s all that mission was about,” I said. I hadn’t meant to sound so bitter.

“So, what did you do about it?”

I blinked hard.

“Do about it?”

“Yeah. It sounds like something unjust happened. What did you do to make it right?”

The silence in the care whined. Fuck. This was way worse than a limp dick.

“I’ve… well, I never…” but I stopped.

I hadn’t done anything. That was the truth. Me and my team had been used like pawns by the very government we had pledged to serve and now that they had used us, and discarded me and my men, I was sitting aside and letting it happen. And here I was, about to tell all this to the most interesting woman I’d ever met.

She shrugged.

“I’m sure you had your reasons,” she said and turned to face the front. That was my cue to start the engine and we pulled off in silence. Of course she felt that way. She was a tough investigative journalist with several expose-style pieces under her belt. Her book, unpopular as it was, had been all about the plight of the lone citizen who does what he believes in even when the entire world is against him.

She couldn’t understand the September mission.

She had no idea.

But as we drove on in the still night, her question stuck to me and wouldn’t go away. What had I done to make any of it right?